The Scripturalness Of This Life

The true Christian life offers complete deliverance from sin, not just partial freedom.

Believers are urged to recognize that Christ’s sacrifice on the cross provides total victory over sin’s power, calling them to trust in God’s promises for a life of holiness and triumph. The chapter challenges Christians to experience the fullness of this redemption, which is not only a future hope but a present reality.

When I approach this subject of the true Christian life, that life which is hid with Christ in God, so many thoughts struggle for utterance that I am almost speechless. Where will I begin? What is the most important thing to say? How will I make people read and believe? The subject is so glorious, and human words seem so powerless! But something I am impelled to say. Someone must tell the secret.

For it is one of that victory which overcomes the world, that promised deliverance from all our enemies, for which every child of God longs and prays, but which seems so often and so generally to elude their grasp.

May God grant me to tell it so. I hope every believer who reads this book will see the truth in Jesus.

May they gain this glorious life for themselves. I am sure that every converted soul longs for victory and rest. Most feel, at times, that they are their birthright. Can you not remember, some of you, the shout of triumph your souls gave when you first became acquainted with the Lord Jesus, and had a glimpse of His mighty saving power? How sure you were of victory then! How easy it seemed, to be more than conquerors, through Him that loved you. Under the leadership of a Captain who had never been foiled in battle, how could you dream of defeat?

And yet, to many of you, how different has been your real experience. The victories have happened, but few and fleeting, the defeats many and disastrous. You have not lived as you feel children of God ought to live. There has been a resting in a clear understanding of truth, without pressing. After the power and life thereof. There has been a rejoicing in the knowledge of things testified of in the Scriptures, without a living realization of the things themselves, experienced in the soul. People believe in Christ, talk about Him, and serve Him, but they do not know him as the soul’s actual and very life, abiding there forever, and revealing Himself there continually in His beauty.

You have found Jesus as your Saviour and your Master, and you have tried to serve Him and advance the cause of His kingdom. You have studied the Holy Scriptures with great attention and have gathered much precious truth here from, which you have endeavored faithfully to practice, but despite all your knowledge and all your activities in the service of the Lord, your souls are starving in silence, and you cry out repeatedly for that bread and water of life which you saw promised in the Scriptures to all believers.

In the very depths of your hearts, you know that your experience is not a Scriptural experience; that, as an old writer says, your religion is “but a talk to what the early Christians enjoyed, possessed, and lived in.” And your souls have sunk within you, as day after day, and year after year, your early visions of triumph have seemed to grow more and more dim, and you have forced yourself to settle down to the conviction that the best you can expect from your religion is a life of alternate failure and victory; one hour sinning, and the next repenting; and beginning again, only to fail again, and again to repent.

Is this all? Had the Lord Jesus only this in His mind when He laid down His precious life to deliver you from your sore and cruel bondage to sin? Did he propose to himself only this partial deliverance?

Did he intend to leave you thus struggling along under a weary consciousness of defeat and discouragement? Did He fear that a continuous victory would dishonor Him and bring reproach on His name?

When He made those declarations about His coming and the work He was to do. Did they mean only what you have experienced? Was there a hidden reserve in each promise that was meant to deprive it of its complete fulfillment? Did each promise contain a reserve that aimed to deprive it of its complete fulfillment? Did “delivering us out of the hands of our enemies” mean only a few of them? Did “enabling us always to triumph” mean only sometimes , or did being “more than conquerors through Him that love us” mean constant defeat and failure?

No, no, a thousand times no! God can save unto the uttermost, and He means to do it. His promise, confirmed by His oath, was that “He would grant unto us, that we, being delivered out of the hand of our enemies, might serve Him without fear, in holiness and righteousness before Him, all the days of our life.” It is a mighty work to do, but our Deliverer can do it. He came to destroy the works of the devil, and dare we dream for a moment that He is not able or not willing to do His own purposes?

In the very outset, then, settle down on this one thing, that the Lord can save you completely, now, in this life, from the power and dominion of sin, and to deliver you altogether out of the hands of your enemies. If you do not think He is, search your Bible, and collect together every announcement or declaration about the purposes and object of His death on the cross. You will be astonished to see how full they look.

Everywhere and always, His work is said to be to deliver us from our sins, from our bondage, from our defilement; and not a hint is given anywhere that this deliverance was to be only the limited and partial one with which the Church so continually tries to be satisfied.

Let me give you a few texts on this subject. When the angel of the Lord appeared unto Joseph in a dream, and announced the coming birth of the Saviour, he said, “And you shall call His name Jesus, for He will save His people from their sins. “When Zacharias was “filled with the Holy Ghost” at the birth of his son, and “prophesied,” he declared that God had visited His people to fulfil the pr omise and the oath He had made them, which promise was, “That He would grant unto us, that serve Him without fear after He delivered us from the hands of our enemies, in holiness and righteousness before Him, all the days of our life.”

When Peter was pr eaching in the porch of the Temple to the wondering Jews, he said, “Unto you first, God, having raised up His Son Jesus, sent Him to bless you in turning away every one of you from his iniquities. “When Paul was telling the Ephesian church the wondrous tru th that Christ had loved them so much as to give Himself for them, he went on to declare, that His purpose in thus doing was, “that He might sanctify and cleanse it by the washing of water by the word, that He might present it to Himself a glorious church, not having spot or wrinkle, or any such thing; but that it should be holy and without blemish.”

When Paul was seeking to instruct Titus, his own son after the common faith, about the grace of God, he declared that the object of that grace was to teach us Godliness in this present world”; and adds, as the reason of this, that Christ “gave Himself for us that He might redeem us from all iniquity, and purify us unto Himself a peculiar people, zealous of good works.” When Peter was urging upon the Christian , to whom he was writing, a holy and Christ- like walk, he tells them that “even hereunto were you called because Christ also suffered for us, leaving us an example that you should follow His steps: who did no sin, neither was deceite found in His mouth”; and adds, “who His own self bare our sins in His own body on the tree, that we, being dead to sins, should live unto righteousness; by whose stripes you were healed.”

When Paul was contrasting in the Ephesians the walk suitable for a Christian, with the walk of an unbeliever, he sets before them the truth in Jesus as being this, “that you put off, concerning the former conversation.

The corrupt old man, according to, and renew your mind in the spirit by putting off the deceitful lusts.

The new man, c reated by God, embodies righteousness and true holiness. “And when, in Romans 6, he was answering forever the question about continuing in sin, and showing how utterly foreign it was to the whole spirit and aim of the salvation of Jesus.

He brings up the fact of our judicial death and resurrection with Christ as an unanswerable argument for our practical deliverance from it, and says, “ By no means! How can we who died to sin still live in it? Do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death? We were buried therefore with him by baptism into death, so that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, we too might walk in newness of life.”(Romans 6:2 -3) We were buried therefore with him by baptism into death, so that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, we too might walk in newness of life. For if we have been united with him in a death like his, we shall certainly be united with him in a resurrection like his. We know that our old self was crucified with him so that the body of sin might be brought to nothing, so that we would no longer be enslaved to sin. (Romans 6:4-6) Dear Christians, will you receive the testimony of Scripture on this matter? The same questions that troubled the Church in Paul’s day are troubling it now: first, “Must we continue in sin that grace may abound?” And second, “Do we then make void the law through faith?” Will not our answer to these be Paul’s emphatic “God forbid”; and his triumphant assertions that instead of making it void “we establish the law”; and that “what the law could not do, in that it was weak through the flesh, God sending His own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh, and for sin, condemned sin in the flesh: that the we who walk not after the flesh, but after the Spirit might fulfill the righteousness of the law.

Can we suppose for a moment that the holy God, who hates sin in the sinner, is willing to tolerate it in the Christian, and that He has even arranged the plan of salvation in such a way that makes it impossible for those who are saved to feel guilt of sin to find deliverance from its power.

Dr. Chalmers makes a precise statement, “We must root out that scandal called sin. “The great spiritual household over which the Divinity rejoices, Strange administration, indeed, for sin to be so hateful to God as to lay all who had incurred it under death, and yet when readmitted, life acknowledges that one should permit sin even under death.

What was before the object of destroying vengeance should now become the object of an upheld and protected toleration.

Now that they have taken off the penalty, do you think that the unchangeable God may have so given up His antipathy to sin, as that man, ruined and redeemed man, may now perseveringly indulge under the new arrangement in that which under the old destroyed him? Does not the God who loved righteousness and hated iniquity six thousand years ago, bear the same love to righteousness and hatred to iniquity still?

I now breathe the air of loving-kindness from Heaven, and can walk before God in peace and graciousness; will I again attempt the incompatible alliance of two principles as adverse as that of an approving God and a persevering sinner? How must we, recovered from so awful a catastrophe, continue that which first involved us in it? The cross of Christ, by the same mighty and decisive stroke wherewith it moved the curse of sin away from us, also surely moves away the power and the love of it f rom over us.”

And not Dr. Chalmers only, but many other holy men of his generation and of our own, as well as of generations long past, have united in declaring that the redemption accomplished for us by our Lord Jesus Christ on the cross at Calvary is a redemption from the power of sin as well as from its guilt, and that He can save to the uttermost all who come unto God by Him. A quaint old divine of the seventeenth century says: “There is nothing so contrary to God as sin, and God will not suffer sin always to rule his masterpiece, man.

When we consider the infiniteness of God’s power for destroying that which is contrary to Him, who can believe that the devil must always stand and prevail? It is inconsistent and disagreeable with true faith for people to be Christians, and yet to believe that Christ, the eternal Son of God, to whom all power in heaven and earth is given, will suffer sin and the devil to have dominion over them. “But you will say no man by all the power he has can redeem himself, and no man can live without sin. We will say, Amen, to it. But if men tell us that when God’s Power helps us and redeems us from sin , if we cannot effect this, then this doctrine we cannot do away with; nor I hope you neither.

“Would you approve of it if I tell you that God puts forth His power to do such a thing, but the devil hinders Him? That God can't do it because the devil does not like it? That no one may be free from sin because the devil has such a power in them that God cannot cast him out? This doctrine is lamentable, yet who has not preached it? It does, in plain terms say that, though God doth interpose His power, it is impossible, because the devil has so rooted sin like man. Isn't man God’s creature, and cannot He make him new, and cast sin out of him? If you say that man roots sin, I agree, but not to the same extent.

Christ Jesus has entered profoundly into the root of the nature of man that He has received power to destroy the devil and his works, and to recover and redeem man into righteousness and holiness. Or else it is false that ‘He can save to the uttermost all that come unto God by Him.’ We must throw away the Bible if we say that God can't deliver man out of sin.

“We know,” he continues, “when our friends are in captivity, as in T urkey, or elsewhere, we pay our money for their redemption; but we will not pay our money if they still keep them in their fetters.

Would not anyone think himself cheated to pay so? He will be said to have made the bargain for their redemption with much money.

Will he redeem himself and be called a redeemed captive, but still wear his fetters? How long? As long as he has a day to live. “This is for bodies, but now I am speaking of souls. I must make Christ to me .

.redemption, and rescue me from captivity. Am I a prisoner anywhere? Yes, he that committed sin, said Christ, he is a servant of sin, he is a slave of sin. If you have sinned, you are a slave, a captive who must be redeemed from captivity.

Who will pay the price for me? I am poor; I have nothing; I cannot redeem myself; who will pay a price for me? There is one who has paid a price for me. That is well; that is good news, then I hope I will come out of my captivity. What is His name? Is He called a Redeemer? So, then, I do expect the benefit of my redemption, and that I will go out of my captivity. No, say they, you must abide in sin as long as you live.

What! Must we never deliver ourselves? Must this crooked heart and perverse will always remain?

Must I be a believer, and yet have no faith that reaches to sanctification and holy living? Is there no mastery to be had, no getting victory over sin? Must it prevail over me as long as I live? What sort of a Redeemer, then, is this, or what benefit have I in this life, of my redemption?”

You could quote similar extracts from Marshall, Romaine, and many others show that this doctrine is no new one in the Church, yet much it may have been lost sight of by the present generation of believers.

It is the same old story that has filled with songs of triumph the daily lives of many saints of God throughout all ages; and is now, we sound forth afresh to the unspeakable joy of weary and burdened souls. Do not reject it, then, dear reader, until you have conducted a thorough search through prayer.

Examine the Scriptures to see whether these things are indeed so. Ask God to open the eyes of your understanding by His Spirit that you may know “ And what is the immeasurable greatness of his power toward us who believe, according to the working of his great might. That he worked in Christ when he raised him from the dead and seated him at his right hand in the heavenly places, ”(Ephesians 1:19 -20), And when you have begun to have some faint glimpses of this power, learn to look away utterly from your own weakness, and, putting your case into His hands, trust Him to deliver you.

In Psalms 8:6, the text tells us that God made man to “ have dominion over the works of your hands; you have put all things under his feet, .” The fulfillment of this is in 2 Cor. 2:14, wh ere the apostle cries, “ But thanks be to God, who in Christ always leads us in triumphal procession, and through us spreads the fragrance of the knowledge of him everywhere .”

If the maker of a machine should declare that he had made it to perform a certain purpose, and if upon trial it should be incapable of accomplishing that purpose, we would all say of that maker that he was a fraud.

Then we will not dare to think that it is impossible for the creature whom God has made, to fulfill the declared object for which he was made. Especially when the Scriptures are so full of the assertions that Christ has made it possible. The only thing that can hinder is the creature’s own failure to work in harmony with the plans of his Creator, and if this want of harmony is removable, then God can work.

Christ came to bring about an atonement between God and man, which should make it possible for God to work in man to will and to do of His good pleasure.

Therefore we may be of good courage; for the work Christ has undertaken He is able and willing to perform. Let us then “walk in the steps of that faith of our father Abraham,” who “staggered not at the promise of God through unbelief; but was strong in faith, giving glory to God; being totally persuaded that what He had promised, He was able also to perform.”